Free Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Page A

jacket; he put his arm around her, she rested her head against his shoulder; they drank more; he said something and she laughed. It all happened very quickly. When Flash led Malinda down the boardwalk steps, then down the street, then steered her into the entrance of a hotel, it wasn’t even fully dark.
    In the elevator up to the room, while Flash and his brothers were laughing about something, Malinda whispered to me, “He’s the drummer!”
    I thought of one of the band’s songs—the one that had played all through the previous summer—and could only call to mind the crooning of the lead singer and a muted trumpet. “I didn’t think they had a drummer,” I said.
    â€œWell he is. He’s from England.”
    â€œHow old is he?”
    Malinda shrugged.
    â€œHe looks kind of old.”
    â€œI don’t care.”
    I shrugged back. “Have fun.”
    The hotel room had been done up in some grandmother’s idea of sophistication, in shades of silver and mauve. The wallpaper featured a pattern of giant metallic flowers, and they glowed strangely in the dark, like flora dusted with nuclear fallout. It was a large room, a suite, and it was dark but for the light of a single dim lamp. Flash picked a pair of jeans off the floor and rifled through its pockets. “Here they are,” he said, and opened his palm, full of tiny red caplets. He held them out to Malinda and she took one and put it in her mouth, and swallowed. Then took another. “Whoa,” said Flash, “take it easy.”
    â€œMy neck hurts,” Malinda said to me. “Flash told me he had some pills.”
    â€œYou want one?” Flash said, looking at me for the first time. “They make you relax,” he said. “You Americans could stand to relax some.”
    â€œEspecially her,” said Malinda. “She’s wound up wicked tight. She never says two words.”
    This was hard to argue with. I took a pill and swallowed it. For a long moment after I felt it in my throat.
    Soon enough Malinda and Flash went into the bedroom under the pretense of Malinda needing a massage. Matt and Mike and I sat around, stolid and dutiful as Buckingham guards, in the manner of all people who sacrifice themselves to the whims of their betters. We were a class of people so common and so hardworking that we might as well have been unionized. Occasionally we grew tired of our work and we complained, carried out little tantrums, made demands—How come we never do what I want? How come we never talk about me?—but for the most part we simply resigned ourselves to our fate.
    â€œWhat should we do then?” said one of the brothers. “We can, uh, I don’t know,” he said. He patted down his pockets and frowned as though it were only a matter of bad luck that he didn’t have something in them with which to entertain a sixteen-year-old. “Christ, I don’t know,” he said. He turned on the TV and ran through the channels. He didn’t see anything that satisfied him—a couple of black-and-white movies, the news, commercials—and sat there turning the channels. Like most of the men I had met he looked older up close. His lips were pale and badly chapped. His skin was ruddy and a pattern of purple veins stood out at the side of his sharp, bony nose. Here and there in his mess of long, frizzy hair I could see a gleam of gray. Like an old man he was in the habit of sniffing sharply, and when he breathed in there was a slight whistling sound.
    â€œWhat instrument do you play?” I said.
    â€œDon’t,” one said. “Neither does Rod.”
    â€œWho’s Rod?”
    â€œThe guy your sister’s with. That’s his name.”
    â€œOh. I thought he was the drummer.”
    â€œNaw,” he said. “We’re just with the band. We do the equipment and sound and all that.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    â€œWhat year are you